About this Senior Staff Technical Program Manager, Data Governance & Privacy role at SoFi
Employee Applicant Privacy Notice
Who we are:
Shape a brighter financial future with us.
Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance.
We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world.
The Role:
As a Technical Program Manager within the Enterprise Data Governance team, you will drive strategic execution across our core data governance processes. Your primary focus is to protect member privacy safeguarding personal information through secure handling, processing, and storage to ensure trust, enforce compliance, and mitigate data exposure risks. You will bridge the gap between corporate data governance policy and operational engineering, leading high-visibility technical programs that secure, classify, and institutionalize data controls across key data platforms.
As a leader, you will partner with engineering, the CIO organization, Legal, Privacy Compliance, and broader stakeholders to shield enterprise data frameworks while accelerating feature delivery.
What you’ll do:
- Own the end-to-end strategy, roadmap, and execution of complex, multi-platform data privacy and data protection initiatives, driving the Privacy Rights Management (PRM) program as a primary priority.
- Partner with engineering and platform teams to translate abstract data governance and privacy policies into actionable technical execution. Own the requirements lifecycle by authoring comprehensive PRDs, defining functional data controls, and ensuring engineering teams have the clear technical specifications needed for deployment.
- Operationalize privacy lifecycles from intake through fulfillment, including the development of automated tools, management of Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs), and establishing governance SOPs for regulatory change management, data onboarding/offboarding, operational metrics, and control validation.
- Operationalize the First Line of Defense (1LOD) ownership model to ensure compliance with evolving U.S. state, international, and SMB privacy obligations, ensuring governance frameworks are scalable and robust.
- Manage the governance standards for both affiliate and non-affiliate data sharing, ensuring full alignment with privacy standards and internal policies. Act as a strategic contributor to core governance pillars, shaping frameworks for Metadata, Data Lineage, Data Retention, and Data Quality.
- Own key metrics and controls to track and provide actionable insights to drive continuous improvement. Propose scalable, incremental counter-proposals to keep the business agile while overseeing asset-level metadata, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) blueprints, and operational egress/ingress integration for data platforms and enterprise SaaS applications.
- Collaborate with federated teams to institutionalize ownership matrices, translate complex regulatory mandates into actionable product requirements. Maintain focus on strategic priorities and outcome-driven execution when navigating ambiguous problems, ensuring clear communication of program status, risks, and mitigation plans to executive leadership.
What you’ll need:
- Bachelor’s degree or higher with practical experience in a technical field.
- Experience
- 9+ years of experience in technical (software, data, engineering) program or Product management.
- Proven track record of driving results across large-scale, enterprise-level programs through cross-functional collaboration.
- Deep expertise in scaling data governance, data privacy, or security risk programs within highly regulated environments (FinTech, Banking, or Enterprise SaaS).
- Strong hands-on experience with cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Postgres, CockroachDB)
- Architectural understanding of data classification standards, API egress patterns, and core data technologies (Python, SQL, Airflow).
- Experience designing AI-driven workflows, LLM applications, or intelligent agents to automate manual governance controls and compliance verification.
- Comfort leading through influence in a highly matrixed, federated model.
- Experience influencing stakeholders and executive leadership through strong analytical skills and clear written and verbal communication
- Strong sense of ownership and bias for action.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in data governance; handling compliance, and/or technology risk management.
- A solid understanding of regulations like CCPA, GDPR, and emerging privacy regulations.
